Twenty billion dollars. According to documents made public in the US Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, that is what Google paid Apple in 2022 to be the default search engine in Safari. What it bought was not a ban. An iPhone user could change search engines in a few taps in Settings; Google’s money was riding on users not doing so.
It looks expensive. By the payer’s own arithmetic it wasn’t, or it would not have paid. A company famous for measuring user behaviour had put a price that year on the most profitable truth it knew: people don’t choose, they stay.
Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein showed this in 2003, in a short paper in Science, using organ donation. Austria and Germany count among the closest of neighbours in language and culture. In Austria the effective consent rate for organ donation was 99.98%; in Germany, 12%. The difference was not a campaign or a gap in values. It was a checkbox: in Austria you had to tick it to not be a donor, in Germany to be one. Countries where donation was the default clustered between 86% and nearly 100%; countries that asked for explicit consent sat between 4% and 27%. Even on one of life’s heaviest questions, people mostly chose to live with the answer the form had given on their behalf. Or rather, they didn’t choose.
Accumulated decisions
We tend to file this under consumer psychology and forget it the moment we get back to work. Yet in companies it is more extreme, because there the defaults are usually designed by nobody. They accumulate. Each of them had a beginning: one day someone made a choice that was reasonable under that day’s conditions. The conditions changed; the choice stayed. And it is no longer remembered as anyone’s choice; it is remembered as “how things work here”, which is the most durable form a decision can take.
A company’s strategy is written not in its presentations, but in the places where nobody made a decision.
Look at an ordinary week. Supplier contracts that renew themselves every year. Meetings that take an hour in the calendar even when the agenda needs twenty minutes. Weekly reports nobody reads and nobody cancels. A budget that starts from last year’s figure plus inflation. None of these went through a board; all of them cost more money and time than most of the decisions the board did approve. The strategy document points one way. The defaults move the company another way, every day, without asking anyone.
The question nobody asks
The truly uncomfortable part of Johnson and Goldstein’s finding is that a default’s power has nothing to do with the quality of the choice. Austrians were not more generous than Germans. In the same way, a contract renewed for ten years does not prove the supplier is good; it only proves that nobody asked.
The unasked question changes both sides. The buyer forgets to compare; that is the familiar part. The unfamiliar part happens to the seller: whoever holds the default gradually learns to invest not in the product but in the default itself. Working to be chosen is expensive; working not to be questioned is cheap. The cheap option wins every time. Until someone asks.
As someone who runs an agency, I have to read this from both sides. Being a client’s default is comfortable, and that comfort is easily mistaken for proof that the work is good. It isn’t. The question that means something to me is not why a client works with us, but when they last seriously considered not working with us. If the answer is “never”, what keeps us there is not our work but a checkbox.
For an executive looking back at their own organisation, the job is not exciting: find the defaults one by one, and turn each into a decision someone has to put their name to again once a year. Most will come back with the same answer. That’s fine. The difference between giving the same answer by choice and inheriting it without asking is invisible on paper, and visible in the first crisis.